Wife disfigured in vicious knife attack

KITCHENER — He said he wanted a bottle of water. A cold bottle of water. He insisted.
And when his wife, the mother of his three young children, went to fetch it for him from the fridge, he grabbed her from behind.
Wielding a knife, Nabil Almousa threw his wife to the floor, pinned her arms and legs, and went at her eyelids with its seven-inch blade.
By the time he got up again, there were seven cuts and slices — and so much blood that a woman who later saw her thought it must be a prank.
“There,” Almousa told her. “You can leave now.”
Almost a year later, as she weighs whether or not to have plastic surgery, she said she is partly to blame for own disfigurement because she said something to make him mad.
But the judge who heard the facts yesterday — about the knife attack and the chain of events building up to it — was having none of that.
“I want you to understand this,” said Justice Michael Epstein, his voice rising as he addressed Almousa, 34, in the prisoner’s dock. “She bears no responsibility.”
The justice called the case one of the worst cases of domestic violence he has even seen.
Court heard the couple met in Jordan, bucking their Muslim tradition of arranged marriages after she caught his eye while working in a store.
“This is a relationship that began simply with love,” said defence lawyer Stephanie Krug.
They came to Canada as refugees in 2007 and quickly had three kids, all still under the age of five.

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On a Saturday in early June, the family went to a mosque in Waterloo and made plans to take the kids to Chuck E. Cheese’s once Almousa had changed at the motel.